ABSTRACT
the late sixties had seen the beginnings of university extension lectures when James Stuart, a recent graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, lectured in towns such as Liverpool and Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. 1 Stuart’s campaign was warmly received in several of these places, and nowhere was stronger support forthcoming than from Nottingham, where a number of men, who were already campaigning for an improvement in elementary education, formed the nucleus of a crusade for higher education. Richard Enfield, the Reverend J. B. Paton, George B. Rothera, and the Reverend Francis Morse were joined in this crusade by Dr. W. H. Ransom, an eminent local medical practitioner who had supported the agitation for a free public library and who was an important figure in the Mechanics’ Institute, and Louis Heymann, the leading lace curtain manufacturer who had been the town’s first foreign-born Mayor and who, in 1844, had been instrumental in establishing the Nottingham School of Design, the fore-runner of the College of Art; Heymann was also a vice-president of the Mechanics’ Institute. Another Nottingham Jew who played an important part in the development of higher education was an influential silk merchant, who was also a brewer, Edward Gold-schmidt, although his support of the college plan—important owing to his influential position as chairman of the Council Finance Committee—occurred at a later stage of its early history.
